Helen Nissenbaum Theory Of Contextual Honesty

Tavani (20015) gives his readers a glimpse into a few of the philosophical theories on the nature and value of privacy that offer an account of what privacy is, such as the right to control and protect information about oneself from other persons. And while the practice of gathering and exchanging student information occurs often in the online and traditional classroom for the purpose of informing, adjusting and individualizing instruction, contextual integrity acts as a necessary framework for expressing privacy expectations, and guides the instructor in responding to conflicts that arise between the protection of one’s privacy and interest in that information (Nissenbaum, 2004). This essay will examine a classroom scenario, where contextual integrity could risk being compromised, by applying Nissenbaum’s theoretical framework of contextual integrity.

Helen Nissenbaum’s theory of privacy as contextual integrity looks to the context, or “sphere of life”, that the gathering and exchanging of information takes place in, rather than to the information itself. She determines the rightness or wrongness of gathering and exchanging data by two informational norms. They are norms of appropriateness and norms of distribution. The first dictates what information about a person is appropriate to gather based on the particular context that it is gathered in,

Likewise, once the students’ “data [is] gathered or collected electronically by one organization [it] is later exchanged with other organizations” (Tavani, 2015, p. 127) and across contexts, raising additional ethical challenges, and as such is not satisfying the conditions for Nissenbaum’s norm of distribution with respect to contextual